Everyone would benefit from seeing further into the future, whether buying stocks, crafting policy, launching a new product, or simply planning the week’s meals. Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts’ predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight, and Tetlock has spent the past decade trying to figure out why. What makes some people so good? And can this talent be taught?
In Superforecasting, Tetlock and coauthor Dan Gardner offer a masterwork on prediction, drawing on decades of research and the results of a massive, government-funded forecasting tournament. The Good Judgment Project involves tens of thousands of ordinary people—including a Brooklyn filmmaker, a retired pipe installer, and a former ballroom dancer—who set out to forecast global events. Some of the …
Everyone would benefit from seeing further into the future, whether buying stocks, crafting policy, launching a new product, or simply planning the week’s meals. Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts’ predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight, and Tetlock has spent the past decade trying to figure out why. What makes some people so good? And can this talent be taught?
In Superforecasting, Tetlock and coauthor Dan Gardner offer a masterwork on prediction, drawing on decades of research and the results of a massive, government-funded forecasting tournament. The Good Judgment Project involves tens of thousands of ordinary people—including a Brooklyn filmmaker, a retired pipe installer, and a former ballroom dancer—who set out to forecast global events. Some of the volunteers have turned out to be astonishingly good. They’ve beaten other benchmarks, competitors, and prediction markets. They’ve even beaten the collective judgment of intelligence analysts with access to classified information. They are "superforecasters."
In this groundbreaking and accessible book, Tetlock and Gardner show us how we can learn from this elite group. Weaving together stories of forecasting successes (the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound) and failures (the Bay of Pigs) and interviews with a range of high-level decision makers, from David Petraeus to Robert Rubin, they show that good forecasting doesn’t require powerful computers or arcane methods. It involves gathering evidence from a variety of sources, thinking probabilistically, working in teams, keeping score, and being willing to admit error and change course. Superforecasting offers the first demonstrably effective way to improve our ability to predict the future—whether in business, finance, politics, international affairs, or daily life—and is destined to become a modern classic.
Superforecasting tells the story of psychologist Philip Tetlock’s project to systematically evaluate the predictions of experts. What exactly does an advisor mean when they tell the President that a military operation has a “good chance” of being successful? It wasn’t so long ago that no one thought to even ask such a question, and as Tetlock shows, the consequences couldn’t be more real. Tetlock’s work led to the development of the Good Judgement project, a forecasting competition designed to identify the characteristics of “superforecasters”, individuals with a quantifiable talent for predicting how world events will unfold. It’s a great book, and one I was partly inspired to read because of my involvement in a student forecasting tournament based on the Good Judgement project (where our students took first and second place overall!)
Superforecasting tells the story of psychologist Philip Tetlock’s project to systematically evaluate the predictions of experts. What exactly does an advisor mean when they tell the President that a military operation has a “good chance” of being successful? It wasn’t so long ago that no one thought to even ask such a question, and as Tetlock shows, the consequences couldn’t be more real. Tetlock’s work led to the development of the Good Judgement project, a forecasting competition designed to identify the characteristics of “superforecasters”, individuals with a quantifiable talent for predicting how world events will unfold. It’s a great book, and one I was partly inspired to read because of my involvement in a student forecasting tournament based on the Good Judgement project (where our students took first and second place overall!)
